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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Do I understand the article correctly that this is talking about the long tail of warming, as the climate gets asymptotically closer to what it'll eventually settle on? Like when you have a fridge and turn the power off, it'll get slower and slower towards environmental temperature, and they calculated this trend for thousands of years given CO2e already emitted rather than in the next, say, 50 years?

If yes, it sounds like something to keep in mind, i.e. it's not like we still have much of a CO2e budget remaining or time to waste (we'll have to take back out of the air what we put in from X years ago onwards), but at the same time it will also take many many years to get to dangerous warming levels (if we stopped emitting on an extremely optimistic schedule) and at some point between "in a while" and "in a few centuries" we have to suck those greenhouse gasses back out of the air to not have this effect run its full course. So this isn't "turns out we're doomed after all" as the headline suggests, just a further-into-the-future calculation that tells us what kinda already made sense (the long tail until settling on a new temperature average).

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You really dont want to roll the dice about the new global climate equilibrium. It is a huge system that we barely understand, and currently we are moving the needle far away from the settled equilibrium. It is perfectly possible that once you reach a tipping point then things will accelerate very fast to the new equilibrium, giving us no time to react.

The concern is that temperature response to emissions may look like other buffered chemical systems. See the PH curves here:https://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/acidbaseeqia/phcurves.h...

Basically we see plateaus where large increments of reagent do nothing, then a massive abrupt shift as the buffering potential of the system fails.

Yes I really do think that makes a lot of sense, all that methane trapped in permafrost springs to mind. These scary once in a generation things do occasionally happen...

Also the ocean acidifying.

It's been disolving a lot of CO2 for us, but at some point, it'll reach an equilibrium and our air concentration of CO2 will go up much faster

That capacity is huge, but in the meantime, all fish will be choked by algae blooms.

It is starting to happen now. Many ocean current turnovers rates are at or approaching the time since the start of the industrial revolution. Up until a few decades ago we kept getting clean water coming up from below with low concentrations of CO2. Now we are getting CO2 laden water that can't absorb nearly as much and what "fresh" water we got left coming to us isn't going to last much longer.

Wow I never thought of it this way. Scary stuff

Yes, this indeed. Especially given the positive feedback loops: https://climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-feedback-loops-ar...

Yeah it's a tricky thing to write about concisely. On the one hand I wanted to add nuance to the alarmist headline, on the other (of course) I 100% agree with "let's not fuck around with the entire planet with tricky to predict effects like gulf stream etc."

I'm the kind of person that annoys all the Germans by driving 95km/h on highways because it cuts fuel emissions nearly in half compared to the recommended speed of 130km/h. We don't even pay for fuel, that's paid by my SO's employer, it's purely because it adds like 10% of time on most trips (those 2-3 minutes are negligible) and allows me to visit family without feeling as bad about individual transport (public transport isn't really an option here for trips further than the next city over, extremely poor connections even by German standards). Or wear extra clothing and put a blanket over my legs while working and see how low we can put the heater. Or not heat the bedroom at all during fall/spring and take a hot water bottle up to get warm under the blanket (must be way more efficient than heating the whole room up). In short, yep I'm with you on not gambling on these estimates. But I'm also for nuance and being realistic lest someone claims that "ökos" / climate weirdos hugely exaggerated again and it's all not so bad. I find it tricky.

Or go faster and plant trees. If you pay for it that helps tree planting economies of scale. (Reforestation, not just monoculture.)

I tried to do the same thing. Yes, individual actions have CO2e costs. It's not you, nor me, nor all of HN together that even can do anything impactful. Setting an example at best. (But then simply presenting a united coherent "yes carbon tax, yes ASAP, yes 125 USD/t" to everybody we discuss this with would probably help more.)

That said, irrational alarmism is its own kind of hell.

Planting trees, carbon capture, etc. is NOT "going faster". It's definitely good if you can do it supplementary, if you have money to burn after funding things that will help reduce emissions (roof insulation, double windows, replace car with electric car, add rooftop solar, fund a solar park or wind turbine nearby, etc.), but in virtually all cases it's much more expensive than reducing emissions and helping others do the same. We need to explore how to live sustainably rather than hope everyone will pay for their share of carbon capture (in the form of trees or whatever) while "the others" fix the underlying problem. We'd need an absolutely humongous number of trees or capture plants to retrieve today's emissions.

That said, I was actually just writing about the topic of planting trees :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25680156

> For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.

I do need to sleep still tonight (0230 here) so I won't now type out (on mobile) the reasons I don't think trees are a reliable option. And by tomorrow it won't matter anymore, nobody will read it (I don't like the ephemerality of HN/reddit threads.) So these are my 2ct, hope I could clarify my reasoning as I will go sleep now.

Oh, thanks! Quite a nice setup partnering with a geothermic power plant!

Currently I prefer reforestation (or even better yet restoration of swamplands), because it's partly EU funded, so there's a small multiplier effect, and there's still a lot of land for "low hanging" forests, which help with local climate patterns a bit.

I'm aware of what >>we<< need to do, and I'm already working on the better heating/insulation part. But individual action is nothing compared to advocacy in terms of impact.

That multiplier effect sounds cool, could you link more info that I can check out tomorrow? Thanks!

I know about it because I've a friend who basically bought a big plot of land and requested funds to plant trees.

EU reforestation, google autocompleted it halfway to eu funding for reforestation :o

"During the current 2014-2020 funding period the programme will contribute approximately €3.4 billion more.

The LIFE programme is divided into two sub-programmes, one for environment (representing 75% of the overall financial envelope) and one for climate action (representing 25% of the envelope)."

https://lifereforest.com/life-programme/

"Some EUR 8.2 billion has been earmarked for the 2015-2020 period (27% for reforestation, 18% to make forests more resilient and 18% for damage prevention)."

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/105/the-e...

I don't see the actual difference between an individual choosing to drive slowly, eat vegan, and be cold at home, and that same individual choosing to spend extra for sequestration. Assuming that the offsets are honest, admittedly a big if.

One is painful in the lifestyle, one in the wallet, and both are drops in the bucket compared to changes on a civilizational level.

Which isn't to say you or anyone shouldn't pursue your own sense of moral behavior, quite the opposite in fact.

I would even say that using a normal amount of, say, electricity, but offsetting it with carbon capture, has one advantage: using a subnormal amount makes power fractionally cheaper for others.

But by how much? Well... by about the amount of difference any one set of human actions makes.

> be cold at home

I'm not cold. I am someone who easily gets cold: I sit still 14 out of 16 hours every day, and I'm also way too selfish to let myself be cold all day every day.

It would neither be sustainable nor a good example for others.

No, I'm warm, sometimes too warm, and the room is currently at 17°C. Still a far cry from climate neutral of course, but a (to me) respectable percentage better than the 21-22°C I used to require as recently as last winter (I just hadn't looked into layering my clothing before, it was surprisingly simple to lower my thermal need by 5°C).

> an individual choosing to [do uncommon things]

Not only does it make me feel better, it also means I have first-hand experience to tell others what they could do and what impact it has had for me. The 2 extra minutes a 20-minute trip takes are mostly peanuts while saving a sizable amount of CO2 as well as money (most people pay for their fuel). I will still drive fast when I am in a rush, but for all regular trips you can choose to do this without leaving much earlier at all.

I think that perspective might help others consider their own choices. If nobody did this, it would be weird and abnormal. Now that they hear my experience, it's less so. I'm still an outlier, but it takes only one more person to set a trend.

This is of course an optimistic view and I'm well aware of that, but the alternative is doom and gloom, saying we realistically won't do anything anyway, why bother. I dunno, just seems nicer to me to try rather than accept failure beforehand. I can only do what I can do, and this is something I can do (walk the walk, then talk the talk).

(Anecdotal addition)

A friend became vegetarian for climate reasons. They drive on the highway at a literal 200km/h (125mph). Knowing that I also eat less meat and do other things towards the climate, upon hearing how fast I drive and what impact a 25% speed reduction already has, I noticed that they at least looked rather thoughtful for a minute. Will they change their habits? That's not up to me and I don't ask after it, but they at least thought about it and it will be a more conscious choice now. They might also be less likely to boast about their driving habit as they previously did, less normalizing such things.

Perhaps also not, what do I know. I just notice that a lot of people around me are making better choices in one area or another. Some use more plastic to better preserve food; it's often a trade-off. I use more clothing to preserve heat. I'm just happy that people are sharing ideas and trying new things.

The ocean has far more effect on co2 than trees. The lush rain forests in South America are C02 neutral, because there is so much life in the rain forest it uses up all the oxygen it produces. The idea that the rain forest are the “lungs” of the earth is just a myth, the oceans are.

Yes, but trees are good at short term carbon capture. And getting back more productive space for our ecosystems is also an important goal.

Sure, it's nothing of what we'll have to sequester, but - as I already mentioned - currently it's quite a low hanging fruit.

Did you measure fuel consumption per km? Difference of gas usage by going 130 or 95 sounds way to high for me.

Wind resistance is proportional to the square of speed -- you experience 90% more going 130 vs 95.

True, but I do not think wind resistance is 100% or your full consumption. But even if it were, then you would you 90% more fuel per hour. But in on case travel more than 30% further. But if I were to guess (at least from my car, but I will check it in the future) it is more like 6,2l/100km at 100km/h and 7l/100km at 130km/h.

> Did you measure fuel consumption per km?

I have a configurable display that shows average fuel consumption per 100km, momentary fuel consumption per 100km, kilometers remaining with available fuel, or some other value that I forgot about.

It's always set to the momentary fuel consumption and I have a good idea about how much things like grades (in/declines), wind, acceleration, etc. impact the consumption. The consumption per 100km is not the best measure for acceleration or idling (more useful would be something like "ml used in last 10 seconds"), but it give me some indication. Using the cruise control to accelerate (when safe; e.g. on steep uphill highway on-ramps you need to shift down and put that pedal down to get to a more safe merging speed) it's limited to about 8-9l/100km which is pretty good (many Germans consider such amounts normal for their cruising speed, let alone accelerating).

On the grander scale, there's no equilibrium.

That's about ad ussefull as "everyone dies eventually, so why worry about murder?"

Just that outside this one we don't know of any new equilibrium, the assumption in parent post.

We barely understand it, but yet we’re confident in the dozens of computer models of it that climatologists use that give varying results?

So far those models have been way too optimistic about things not being as bad, so my current priors would expect things to be worse than models say

That’s a funny way of saying “I trust them because they were wrong.”

Except they don't give varying results. 10/14 models with published surface temperature predictions since the 1970s were statistically indistinguishable from reality: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-cli...

It only takes a glance at CO2 levels. You don't even have to predict anything to know that things are going to end badly.

You don't have to predict anything to predict what's going to happen?

With my layman understanding this is correct in principle but according to the linked paper in the article the climate target of 1.5 C will already be surpassed in the year 2100 – even without any further CO2 emissions.

And yes, the tail effects of global warming beyond our usual time horizon of 2030/2050 were already known.

I've thought the consensus among experts is that we'll have to not only stop pollution but also re-capture a lot of what we've already released?

And recapture isn’t going to be easy. We’d have to figure out how to drive the global economy off of the recapture process

If there are no significant emissions to tax, then fixing environmental damage done by past generations sounds like something for governments to pick up with public money. We also spend public money on forest management, wildlife bridges to create reasonably sized habitats, etc.

It's also a while out. We have bigger issues today than "who's gonna suck back out some CO2 once we cut emissions sufficiently". We'll get to that in due time.

For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.

It's easier to just drive the prices of CO2 certificates up. A EU CO2 certificate for 1 ton of CO2 costs 25€. If you buy it and resell it at a higher price like 100€ it's either too expensive and will never be bought or if it will be bought you will be economically harming CO2 emitting companies.

My initial thought is that funding those participating in an ineffective scheme does not strike me as the most helpful option. But I really don't know enough about it to comment on whether that is the case here, or if it might indeed make sense for me to do this. Do you know of any research (doesn't have to be published, a blog post with a good analysis is just as helpful) that looked into whether this is a good idea?

I think the argument is that if we stopped all our CO2 emissions right now we would comply with the 1.5 C target in 2050 but would "only" break it in 2100. Since stopping all our emissions is not even close to what's happening (actually CO2 emissions are rising right now) that's not a viable model. So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first.

>So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but isn't the necessary tech "planting trees"?

The main problem with trees is they’re very slow. It would take decades after we started planting billions of trees a year before they’d have grown to the extend where they’d have captured reasonable amounts of carbon.

So, yes, it’s an option. But it’s a slow option we’d need to start implementing immediately if we wanted it bear fruit.

(We produce enough CO2 that it takes 40 billion hardwood trees growing for 40 years to sequester as much CO2 as we make in a year. We’d have to plant a lot of trees, and then not touch them for years, to affect the course of things)

A tree captures CO2 temporarily. We would have to bury the wood to actually remove it from the atmosphere.

You are aware that "temporarily" in this context is the lifespan of a tree, right? Trees live anywhere from several decades to 20+ centuries, and their remains, once broken down, provide nutrients to the soil so more trees can grow.

Also the tree is not capturing carbon, instead emitting, half of the year if not planted in the optimal places near the equator. And it's carbon neural or negative once almost fully grown.

Hence why you need to cut them down and bury.

That's not true. Trees metabolize year round, and they literally breathe CO2.

Once a tree is fully grown it essentially stops capturing CO2.

Again, that is not true. Trees need CO2 for respiration. Basic biology, folks.

Basic biology should tell you that the only thing that counts for carbon capture is biomass added. Anything that the tree does that doesn't permanently add to its mass can't capture carbon permanently. Hence, once a tree stops growing, it stops capturing carbon. It still respirates because it does things that require energy, but any carbon it captures doing so is released fairly quickly again, e.g. when the leaves it produced in spring fall off and rot. Of course many trees keep growing a little even after they reach maturity, but the rate of growth is minuscule. A mature stable forest stores a large amount of carbon, but it hardly captures any more.

Well, you know what? Plants reproduce, too.

And, BTW, trees don't stop growing. They keep adding mass in their trunks. Literally the first google hit for "do trees stop growing": https://earthsky.org/earth/what-makes-a-tree-stop-growing

Edit: guess what? They even grow faster as they get older! https://www.npr.org/2014/01/16/262479807/old-trees-grow-fast...

That is a different point.

Anyway, the land we have is limited. You literally can't cover the planet in one big forest to capture the gigatons of carbon we have released. You have to do active forest management and store the carbon somewhere stable, for example as biochar.

Reducing the numbers of those pesky humans would help.

You can't reduce the number of humans quickly enough without a genocide.

Doesn't mean we still don't need to reduce numbers for long term sustainability.

That's the one thing climate change is good at once it gets bad. I thought we wanted to avoid this?

No. The one thing we want to avoid is making the Earth into an unlivable hellscape for those who remain alive.

They breath oxygen, they "feed" on CO2, once fully grown they need less food and that changes the balance

No, that is wrong. Plants emit O2, and consume CO2. This is called respiration.

You are mostly right, but some of that carbon does sink into the soil and get captured for much longer periods, and some of that will will sink further and likely never see the surface of the earth again unless someone digs it up.

If you pants trees om every bit of avaliable land, that stilll would not be enough to compensate for the emissions - we use a lot of land for farming, and are emittinghundreds of years wortg of tree-catrure per decade.

Sort of, yeah, but note that the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is on the order of a couple centuries for scrubbing into the deep oceans (it gets scrubbed faster into other sinks such as the ocean surface, but those sinks also fill up).

So any warming effect will only last centuries, not thousands of years.

The climate doesn't have an asymptote unless all the inputs are steady. If humanity were to disappear, the warming would continue for a while but then start to subside as the excess CO2 is absorbed in the oceans (absent things like feedback loops due to arctic methane, etc...).

To be blunt: we've fucked it up already, and anything we do to "fix" world ecology at this stage is going to be characterized as something like terraforming. We aren't ever going back to "normal" in our lifetime or our grandkids'.

Don't you think we might have to terraform (to experiment with our only planet) a whole lot less if we manage to reduce, reuse, recycle instead of continue as we do?

I agree that it seems likely that we'll have to do some sort of geo-engineering in the future. But if you mean that as an excuse to not even try and just let future generations undo everything with hopefully better tech and a world in chaos, then I vehemently disagree. I don't even have kids nor plan on ever having any, it's just immoral (and perhaps it's my way of finding purpose in life to help fix a problem humanity is facing).

> “as the climate gets asymptotically closer to what it'll eventually settle on?”

Earth’s climate has never and will never “eventually settle” regardless of the existence of humans.

I'm looking at a human scale, on the order of thousands of years at most (in 1000 years, I expect we'll be able to live on space ships for considerable amounts of time, perhaps even long enough to reach nearby stars before we need to resupply).

Within a few thousand years, there are already cycles visible. If that's what you refer to, then I just mean to generalize that cycle to a new average. E.g. if we cycled between 19°C and 21°C every 11 years due to the solar cycle, then that would be shifted to 21-23°C instead. (I'm making these numbers up, they're just examples of what kind of effect I mean.)

Beyond those thousands of years, even if we're considering the sustainability of our climate even if we had never discovered the use of fire in the first place, yeah there is no "eventually settle" of course. It will change depending on things like the sun burning out, asteroids hitting, other geological shifts, changes in who inhabits the world, etc. That seems beyond the scope of the discussion, we can't simply change that by changing our habits.

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